The House on Fripp Island

by Rebecca Kauffman

  Then she was on top, her full weight on him, straddling him, and they kissed there, lips and tongues searching and soft and muscular and reckless, four hands moving frantic and grasping here, rubbing there, the whole world pulsing with need all around them.

  That was as far as it went. Lisa was the one who pulled away first, her crotch still on his, two layers of fabric, one silk and one cotton, the only barriers between their flesh, but Lisa pulled away, gazed at his face, and murmured, “No,” and she rolled off of him with great effort, panting, her eyes wild.

  Ryan couldn’t speak. The whole world was in his throat. He lay on his back, and she lay there next to him, both staring at the sky, two wild hearts vibrating loud with lust and fear.

  Lisa said in a breath, “I am so sorry.”

  Ryan swallowed. “Me too,” he whispered.

  It was quiet for a long time, until the night felt like a dream.

  Finally, Lisa said, “Do you think it’s possible that that didn’t happen between us?”

  “Yes.” Ryan nodded. “It was just a dream.”

  Lisa got up first.

  Ryan stayed outside a while longer. When he finally made it back to his bedroom, it was after four o’clock. He was sick over what had happened. He stared at the living crab in the glass of blue water and it stared back.

  19

  I heard him leave his room around three o’clock in the morning. Sleep was nowhere near me. I was full of alcohol, young blood, hormones, and stupid ideas about the world.

  Earlier in the night, just after Ryan had gone to bed, I went to the kitchen and emptied the contents of the blender into a plastic cup and took this to my bedroom. It was three inches’ worth of melted daiquiri. I’d been doing this for over a year now, wait for my parents to have their fill and become loopy and weary and inattentive. I’d swipe the bottom few inches of whatever they had been sipping on, transfer it to a different cup, and take it to my bedroom. Or if I was certain that it wouldn’t be noticed, I would pour myself a glass of wine straight from the bottle, as I had done the night before, when Kimmy caught me. I was still learning how much I dared drink before I got too stupid or too sick.

  That night, the melted daiquiri was so sugary and thick with pulp that I couldn’t detect the amount of alcohol, but it must have been at least a few ounces of rum. Soon the drink was gone and the room was spinning. I held a trash can between my bare sweating thighs in case it all came back up. After a few minutes, the early blast and intensity of the buzz had passed, as had the nausea, but I was still wide awake, hot as blazes, mind zooming, each thought like a thunderclap. I tried to adjust the air conditioning in my room to cool it down, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. When I heard Ryan leave his room, I figured he was going to the kitchen for a snack, so I listened for his return. I knew it was him because our bedrooms shared a wall. I waited two minutes. Five minutes. Ten.

  I didn’t hear my mother leave her bedroom because it was at the other end of the hall, although I imagine she left her room shortly after he left his. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. As the minutes passed and Ryan did not return to his room, my curiosity and courage multiplied. It occurred to me as I lay there in bed, short of breath, my cheeks hot, that perhaps he was waiting for me. Perhaps I would not have to wait until tomorrow night to find out if I was to be an unkissed, untouched girl. Perhaps, I thought, Ryan was silently summoning me from elsewhere in the house. He was too timid to come for me directly, but he had intended for me to hear him leave his room, and was now waiting for me to come find him. See, this was the sort of thing I read about in my books—this was the sort of miracle that could exist for a girl like me, who had never been kissed.

  I had removed my pajama pants, and now I put them back on as I crawled out of bed. The elastic waistband of my panties was damp. The hair around my face was damp. My face was damp. The clock read 3:08 a.m.

  I left my room and went to the living room. He was not there, but when I glanced out at the patio, I noticed something . . . A plume of white smoke, twirling as thin as a vine, rose from beneath the patio. A little gasp escaped me. I understood now. He was outside, on the far side of the patio, on the beach and out of sight of anyone in the house, smoking a cigarette that was meant to communicate his location to me and only me—the smoke was a beacon. We were going to kiss, and maybe, probably, more. Concerned that opening the patio door might wake someone else in the house, I crept back through the hallway to the staircase at the far end. Down the stairs. Through the rec room. My heart thrashed against my thin pajama top. I felt like I might cry, but of course I wouldn’t.

  I paused at the sliding glass door, which was pulled shut but unlocked. He might have already seen me, I realized, since I would be illuminated from behind by the light over the utility sink across the rec room. I hesitated, letting my eyes adjust to the night before me, and then prepared myself to go out into it.

  That’s when I saw her hair. She was on top.

  The universe blinked shut like an old-fashioned flashbulb. A hiss, and everything was gone. Then everything was back. I saw them in color, her red hair, his tanned arms, then in black and white, then in an oozing, inky nightmare. I hiccupped and swallowed back a rush of hot, sour nausea. They never saw me. They moved like aliens. Like monsters.

  I ran. Back through the rec room, up the stairs, through the bedroom hallway, and out the front door of the house. Silent that whole way, not by willpower but by necessity; my throat was full of wasps. My desire to thrash wildly, to run and wake my father, to scream into his sleeping mouth what I had seen, to do some terrible violence to my mother, all this was overridden by my desire to get away from that house, as far as I could, and as fast. I took a left out of the driveway, pounding in bare feet up the sandy sidewalk, which was still damp from the rain. Tears were now slime that coated my face.

  I ran and wheezed, my body feeling strangely insufficient.

  Then I decided where to go. Yesterday afternoon, after the jellyfish, I had walked up the beach by myself to find it. There was no guarantee; the only way to identify the house would be to see either the man himself or his brown Labrador with the red collar entering or exiting. But luck was on my side, and the ten-minute walk proved worthwhile, because suddenly Leo and his handsome owner were in view as they made their way up the beach. I used my binoculars to confirm their identity. Leo’s long, pink tongue hung limp as a noodle from the side of his mouth. The owner had a leash and a towel in hand. I drew a little closer and watched as the man brushed sand off Leo’s paws. They entered, not a house but an apartment above a garage, through a side door of the garage. A light appeared inside a moment later.

  Although I had lacked the courage in broad daylight that afternoon to go any closer to his home or make my presence known to him, I noted the location of the place. My focus had been on Ryan in the hours since; I’d barely had a second thought about the man and his house. But now that I’d seen what I’d seen . . . now I was determined to find this man, to make him mine and to make myself his.

  Eventually, I found myself on the sidewalk in front of a set of similar-looking homes, and I gathered, through my wildness and several ounces of rum, that I was in the right area. I decided to go down to the beach so that I would have the same view that I’d had yesterday from the shore. I crept stealthily between houses, jogging over sand that was cool between my toes. I made a beeline for the beach, where I would be outside the reach of the safety lights that most homes had installed above their garages. From the water’s edge, I would be both protected by darkness and able to view the homes from yesterday’s vantage point. As I moved between houses and then through a marshy patch, I crashed through some brush and wet, soupy sand, then over something prickly that hurt my foot. I hopped on one leg, long enough to extract the small, thorny thing that had pierced the bottom of my foot, then I ran over sand that felt like silk. I ran and ran toward the water, toward the moon, my thin yellow pajamas sticking to my sweating body.

&
nbsp; I should mention that I have no recollection of what my exact intentions were at this point. Everything was a confused blur, and I was completely alone. The world had just proven itself to be an absolute terror, yet I feared nothing. See, I understood now that my mother wasn’t protecting me when she chased this man away from me on the beach; she wanted him for herself, just like she wanted Ryan. I knew now that my mother was my enemy—I felt this truth coursing through me.

  Difficult as this may be to accept, I would say it is a small blessing in death to be freed from the great burden of feelings and the belief that everything that originates from within you is true, can be trusted, and must be acted upon.

  20

  WHEN ROXIE WOKE for her run at 3:30 in the morning, Keats was still gone and hadn’t checked in. This was not unusual. Roxie didn’t imagine she’d see him until the Jacuzzi repair had been completed, and she guessed something like that could take many hours. Coffee was brewing and bread was in the toaster by 3:35; she wanted to be out the door by 4:00 so she could have the whole circuit done before sunrise. She decided to take Leo down to the beach for his morning pee while the coffee brewed. Leo was slow to be roused, but as soon as he was fully awake, he was ready for a swim. Outside, the moon was low and blurry and the air was thick, with some pockets of strange heat.

  Roxie and Leo had been down at the water for only a short time when she spotted the girl.

  She was short, couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, Roxie guessed, and she was tearing down toward the water, wearing yellow pajamas, a crazed look on her face.

  Roxie held Leo by the collar so he would stay at her side. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, but Roxie was afraid he would run at the girl, thinking this was play, and leap at her in some fearsome way. She held the dog and stood still, her heart vibrating in her eye sockets, waiting to see what the girl would do. She wondered if the girl had just been attacked. She wondered if the girl was suicidal. Roxie took a few steps forward with a friendly arm half raised, hoping she wouldn’t startle the girl.

  Whatever was going on, Roxie was already formulating a plan, figuring out how she could help the girl. Comfort her. If the girl was in some sort of trouble, she could wait in Roxie and Keats’s home until help arrived. The girl could have the coffee and toast Roxie had prepared for herself if she was hungry or wanted a hot drink. The girl could borrow a pair of pants and a sweater if she felt exposed in her pajamas, she could take a shower or a warm bath. The girl could sleep on their couch. It crossed Roxie’s mind that perhaps the girl’s parents were fighting, as Roxie’s parents had fought when Roxie was a girl and they had vacationed on Fripp Island. Sometimes Roxie’s parents’ fighting was enough to make Roxie want to flee the house at three o’clock in the morning. Whatever was going on with the girl, Roxie could help.

  21

  Before I reached the water’s edge, an instinct alerted me to the presence of someone else on the beach. I stopped at the water and raised both hands to my chest, where my sternum felt tight and angry and sharp, like it might be trying to escape my body.

  She was staring at me. She had a long blond braid that glittered silver in the moonlight. White T-shirt and blue running shorts. She was very pretty.

  Leo was at her side, wet like he’d just been in the water, and he was staring at me too. She held his collar. As soon as I stopped running, she made a gesture indicating that it was safe for me to approach. When I didn’t, she said, “I didn’t know if you were gonna stop before you got to the water! You had me scared, kid. Are you OK?” Her eyes were bright and wide with concern.

  I said, “Is that your dog?”

  She nodded. She wore a wedding ring and held a tennis ball. She patted Leo’s head and said, “He’s very friendly,” and she looked at me warmly, expectantly, like it might make everything better if I could pet this friendly dog.

  I said, “Where’s your husband?”

  She cocked her head at me, curious but not necessarily upset by the question. She didn’t answer, though.

  I was still panting. I said, “What are you doing out here?”

  “I’m about to go for a run,” she said. She gazed at me for a moment, then said, “What are you doing out here?”

  I coughed, and it seemed to rattle something loose inside me; it set free something mean and stupid. I still can’t explain precisely what drove me to say what I said. “He came up to me on the beach yesterday and talked to me. My mom had to chase him away.”

  The blond woman’s whole pretty face changed in one instant. Her eyes darkened and her brow closed in. Her chin seemed to grow. She stared straight at my face and didn’t speak or blink.

  I waited for her to react. To call me a liar. Or to beg me to tell her the details of my interaction with her husband—maybe she would say, I knew it! Maybe she would weep and confess to me that she knew he had tried to pursue me. But she still didn’t speak, only looked at me with a face that was hard and sad and confused.

  I said, “He told me to come meet him here at night.”

  22

  WHEN THE GIRL said this, Roxie’s brain went black. Something went screaming through her entire body as fast and fiery as a rocket launch. Her heart froze in an instant.

  She lunged at the girl, driven by the sense that this was not real, none of it. Not the moon or the ocean or the girl in the yellow pajamas, not the things the girl was saying about Keats, or the possibility that Keats might find himself in the position of needing to defend himself again—none of it was real to Roxie in that moment, and she knew that it was not real because the moon was too low and strange and bright. This entire scenario was not real, and therefore, for her next actions, there could be no consequences. This was just a dream that needed to end.

  Her first impulse was not to kill the girl but simply to silence her.

  But once the girl was thrashing under the water, Roxie knew she had to go the whole way. The moment she forced the girl’s face down into the surf was the moment that she sealed her fate. Allowing the girl to live after assaulting her would have ended Roxie. And so the girl had to die.

  Because, of course, if the girl lived to tell her story, the police would believe it. Keats was, after all, on the registry. They would believe every single one of the girl’s lies—from Keats approaching her on the beach, to Keats instructing her to meet him there in the middle of the night, to Roxie lunging at her out of jealousy, or whatever twisted psychosis the girl might dream up to explain it. They were monsters, Keats and Roxie, at least that’s what the police and the girl’s parents and the community would believe. Their lives would be over, while the girl would be given years of counseling for her trauma and would be applauded for her bravery in exposing the monsters, for escaping their trap, and providing all the information the prosecution would need to make sure Keats and Roxie would never see the light of day, or each other, again.

  Roxie’s eyes watered but her muscles did not tremble or flinch as she put her full weight onto the girl’s back. Each of her movements was strong and true, purpose and necessity guiding her hips as they bore down on the girl’s tiny waist. Roxie’s knees sunk deep into sand along the girl’s sides, and she applied pressure to the back of that small skull with the heels of her hands instead of grabbing with her fingertips, in order to avoid bruising. Roxie vomited the contents of an empty stomach, bile and saliva, into the ocean when the girl stopped struggling, when her whole small body suddenly went as soft and pliant under the water as a handful of hair.

  Once the girl was dead, Roxie acted quickly, knowing that the longer it took her to decide on her next move, the more likely it was she would be seen.

  The dead girl floated easily through the water, like an oversized inflatable.

  Roxie pulled the girl by her arms, moving smoothly and with the current to avoid bruising, farther out to sea. Farther, farther. They reached a sandbar, the ocean so shallow that Roxie had to roll the girl over the sand instead of pulling her through water. She rolled clumsily, hip bone, shou
lder bone, hip bone, shoulder bone, the girl’s head lolling back and forth. Roxie avoided looking at her face. Leo was at her side, splashing happily, thinking this was all great fun.

  Out past the sandbar, farther, farther, then swimming with the girl’s neck tucked in her underarm like a dummy, farther, farther, until Roxie could almost not touch ground. She assessed the current. They were past the break, so the girl would likely be carried north a little way, but would remain at this distance from shore until the tide came in around dawn. At that same time, the tide would cover their footsteps in the sand, and any evidence of the struggle. Assuming no one noticed the girl’s disappearance between now and then, it would be very difficult for anyone to assess exactly where she had entered the water.

  Roxie left the body and swam to shore with Leo at her side. He shook out his coat, which turned his dark hair instantly to spikes. Roxie ran to the house, shaking violently now, not from cold but from the knowledge of what she had done. The proficiency with which she had performed the murder and pulled the body out to sea had used up every calculated survival instinct and given way to the warm beating human heart of her. She was filled with horror.

  Once she reached their house, she pulled Leo in the door, even as he stood waiting outside to be dried with a towel. She yanked him in soaking wet by his red collar, locked the door behind him, and went directly to the bedroom. She removed her wet clothing, threw it into the shower, and got into bed, completely naked, where she began to cry in strange bursts.

  Not understanding why he had been permitted to enter the house with wet, sandy paws, Leo decided to push his luck and crawl up onto the bed with Roxie. She allowed him to stay, wet sandy paws and all, and he nuzzled into her. He watched and listened to Roxie’s crying and felt simple and confusing emotions. Already, the encounter with the girl was gone from Leo’s memory.